Song Of The Day 1/23/2015: Yvonne Baker - "You Didn't Say a Word"

Yvonne Baker pictured with the Sensations

Northern Soul Week: I love this one. I mean I super-love this one. It's got that nice little pseudo-007 guitar hook. Some horn charts that were a little ahead of their time. It's sort of a collision, as I'm finding out a lot of Northern Soul was, between Motown and Philadelphia and some X-factor -- I guess given the James Bond allusion here we could say it's John Barry. This was the only solo single I could find under Yvonne Baker's name. She spent a lot of the '50s and '60s in a Philly vocal group called the Sensations. In fact I couldn't find any useable picture of just Yvonne by herself, so you have to make do with the group shot. Let me know if you have a hard time picking her out in it.

It's probably wiser to be placing the original version of this song up here today, but the first version I was going to use was recorded by Patti Austin in 1972. She's the person who had a #1 hit called "Baby Come to Me," which was recorded with James Ingram in 1983. Everybody's recorded with James Ingram. I think I might have cut some tracks with him after a particularly profitable night at roulette back in 1986. I couldn't use Austin's version of "You Didn't Say a Word," despite its being unavailable in almost all formats, because of intervention by some invisible yet assiduous accountants. Make the damn thing commercially available again if that's how you're going to be about it, pencilnecks. Anyway, here's the original.